News

Gruber Prize awarded to Planck team

11 May 2018

The 2018 Gruber Prize has been awarded to the Planck satellite team, which includes Dick Bond and Peter Martin. On behalf of the entire Department, congratulations!

“The Planck project has made definitive measurements of the properties of our expanding universe. This stunning achievement was the result of a large group effort, and we are pleased to recognize both the Planck team as a whole and its principal science team leaders.” Says Robert Kennicutt, University of Arizona, and Chair of the Selection Advisory Board to the Prize

Dick and Peter should tell the long story behind the Planck success and their own contributions. Dick brought the entire CM B community to Toronto back in 1984 (as I recall) back in the era of bitnet (a precursor to the internet) for the “Delta T over Tea” workshop. That workshop laid out a vision of CMB research which culminated in Planck. A key recognition for Planck was the importance of understanding and accurately handling foreground signals, in particular, galactic dust. Peter’s Cambridge PhD thesis provided fundamental insight into dust’s polarization properties for which he provided much of the analysis for Planck.